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Wednesday, October 8, 2014

What's wrong with this picture?

I was visiting my local walk-in clinic the other day and noticed the news feed zone across the bottom of the screen was blanked out. But that wasn't the worst of it. There's a lot more going on here.

If I were the venue owner, I would be concerned about seeing a large portion of the screen dedicated to promoting the screen network itself. In fact this self-advertising graphic occupies more space than the venue's own branding. Then we have the main content area squeezed between a header at the top and the news and weather feed at the bottom. This significantly reduces the impact of the main content zone in the middle of the screen.

It's unfortunate because a lot of the content shown on that screen was useful and informative but it was squished and stretched into an ugly layout.

If I were redesigning this layout, I would...

Drop the venue operator/owner's logo from the screen. If the person looking at this does not know where they are, they either need glasses or they have serious cognitive issues. This particular venue is a walk-in medical clinic so you kind of expect the audience to be aware of their location. This is something I would classify under... "Duh!"

Take out the entire branded header area and resize the main content zone so it occupies at least 80% of the screen. Better yet, I would also take out the scrolling banner (see point 4 below). If the network operator wants to promote themselves, they should make their branding less conspicuous. Speaking to network operators... Unless you have statistics to the contrary, you should assume folks looking at your screens are interested in the venue's content, not who is delivering it.

If you need to display news and weather feeds, consider using a commercial provider like Screenfeed or Seenspire. This will ensure a more reliable service and you won't breach any acceptable use policies with the content owner. Redistributing a publicly available RSS feed is almost never permitted. Read the fine print.

Instead of filling screens with multiple channels of information, why not opt for full screen content with larger text and bold graphics. Multi-channel/multi-zone content layouts are becoming a big issue for an aging population that cannot read the smaller fonts used in these layouts. Legibility should be paramount.

Remember folks. People don't have to look at your expensive TV unless they have a good reason to do so. If they don't like what they see, they'll just grab their smartphones and ignore it all. Give your audience a good reason to look at your content.